Claxton Opera

Pictures: Tony Ackers

2014

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Benjamin Britten

The production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer
Night's Dream was set in the beautiful, secluded garden of Ashby
St. Mary Hall, only a stone's throw from the Old Meeting House
on 10th, 11th, 12th and 17th, 18th, 19th July 2014. Our
thanks go to Christopher and Anita Kemp, the owners of Ashby Hall,
for their kind permission to stage this production in their garden.

Benjamin Britten takes Shakespeare's delicious
confection of human passion, fairy spite,and pure high spirits and
marinates them in a dark rich musical sauce. This delicious meal
will be served up in Norman Manners' dreamlike, prelapsarian and
monumental scenery which will create a bridge between reality, dream
and enchantment. The drama examines the sharp pricks of love in all
their pain and anguish, but all is at last resolved in tender
harmony and delight. Geoff Davidson conducts, The Junior Broadland
Choir sprinkles the Fairy Dust, Richard White directs and our cast
brings together Claxton Opera's most accomplished soloists and a
motley crew of crusty peasants to delight you. Who could resist it?!

Our Production

We began music rehearsals with Geoff Davidson our
Musical Director at the beginning of February. It's wonderful stuff
but very challenging even though it was composed more than fifty
years ago. Britten is exploring the very limits of the possibilities
of diatonic composition. Overall I think that A Midsummer Night's
Dream contains some of the most direct, passionate and emotionally
charged music he ever wrote. There are a number of passages which
even now after six months of study I cannot hear without the most
intense emotion.

My dear wife Bobby died just a year ago and
Britten's tender and intense exploration of dream, reality, love and
reconciliation have accompanied and helped my journey through grief
and memory towards resolution. I'm going to dedicate the production
to the memory of our life together.

Rehearsals are enormous fun and very hard work, as
ever, some seem to absorb it all with consummate ease while others
struggle on book in hand trying desperately to imprint Britten's
challenging musical structures on their heavily challenged memory
cells! We're rehearsing at the moment at The Old Meeting House where
a twenty foot square stage has to stand in for a lawn one hundred
feet long by forty feet deep. So large is the acting area that I've
put Puck on a bike. Even so I don't think he'll quite manage to put
a girdle round the earth in forty minutes!

The Rude Mechanicals are all old friends including
of course John Barnett our erstwhile conductor who is taking to the
boards as Peter Quince the rather troubled director of the famous
play Of Pyramus and Thisbe, a play he describes as 'a tedious brief
scene ......very tragical mirth'. Our four lovers, Andrew, Selina,
Huw and Ruth make a handsome foursome in voice and person and will
certainly charm and excite their audience as they struggle to
resolve their heart-ache in the the dark wood of dreams. I'm still
trying to persuade Ruth to take a dive into the lake! I've had one
rehearsal so far up at the garden with David who plays Puck. He
zoomed about on his bike around the lawn and seemed not to be
damaging it. The lawn is the much cherished possession of our most
generous hosts Christopher and Anita Kemp. He will actually be
riding a 1930s delivery boy's bike and we are going to build him a
'magic' bridge over the little lake.

Meanwhile Pat Tegerdine our once retired wardrobe
lady has nobly stepped back in for our last show and has the
costumes well under way. We've already had a try-on for Tytania -
perfect; and I think she'll be able to climb in and out of her Fairy
Barge without falling into the aforementioned lake! Another group of
loyal and rather skilled old, old friends have been working on the
set. We meet for a day a week, drink a lot of coffee, enjoy
leisurely lunches and construct a lot - in this case a huge amount
of scenery. When we're not making scenery we meet every few months
for a Claxton Old Farts Lunch (our chosen title - we are all of a
certain age. These occasions tend to be very noisy and moderately
bibulous. I think we rather resemble Shakespeare's Rude Mechanicals,
indeed three of us are Rude Mechanicals in this production.).

Yet another group under the guidance of Norman
Manners is painting the scenery as it comes off the Old Farts
assembly line. These meet at least once a week here at Claxton
sometimes just for a morning, sometimes all day and the product is
looking wonderful. There is so much of it my sheds are bursting! WE
do need more painters - get
in contact and come and help us! So, it's going well and very
soon I shall start the cast on learning an ANTI RAIN DANCE in
preparation for mid July.

Richard

Publicity Pictures

Click on picture to see full size

Pictures by James Laws

History

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 64, is an opera
with music by Benjamin Britten and set to a libretto adapted by the
composer and Peter Pears from William Shakespeare's play, A
Midsummer Night's Dream. It was premiered on 11 June 1960 at the
Aldeburgh Festival, conducted by the composer and with set and
costume designs by Carl Toms.